Gold Coaster: the Alumni Magazine of Adams House
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THE ALUMNI MAGAZINE OF ADAMS HOUSE, HARVARD COLLEGE A T UTOR'S T ALE: W HEN HOUSE IS HOME Sean M. Lynn-Jones The author at the B-entry "Love or Pas de Love" Party in 1992 Choosing (and Being Chosen By) Adams In the spring of 1984, I was a graduate student in the Department of Government at Harvard. For several years, I had aspired to become a resident tutor in one of Harvard’s houses. I hoped that living in a house would provide a sense of community, which was sorely lacking in the lives of most graduate students, not to mention free food and housing. Although I had been a nonresident tutor at Dudley House and then Currier House, I applied to be a resident tutor in Adams, mainly because Jeff Rosen ‘86 told me that Adams might be looking for a Government tutor and encouraged me to apply. At that time, Adams House had a very pronounced image as the “artsy-fartsy gay house.” The stereotype oversimplified the character of the house, but there was no doubt that Adams House was more bohemian, fashionable, tolerant, diverse, and creative than any of Harvard’s other houses, even if it lacked a large population of varsity athletes. My friends joked that I didn’t seem to fit the Adams bill at all: I was straight, my artistic, dramatic, and musical talents were extremely well hidden, and the only black items in my wardrobe were socks. Nevertheless, I convinced myself that tutors didn’t have to fit the stereotype of their houses and enthusiastically applied to Adams, met with Master Robert Kiely and several students, and was pleasantly surprised to receive very soon after an offer of a resident tutorship. I did not respond converted by Web2PDFConvert.com immediately, however. I had also applied to be a resident tutor in Leverett House. Adams had some clear advantages: the food was reportedly better, I had heard that the rooms were nicer, and the house was conveniently located near the Yard and the heart of Harvard Square. Adams, of course, also had the unique advantage of having its own opulent and notorious swimming pool. (For the most complete and revealing history of the Adams House pool ever published, see HERE. One of the most important perks of being a resident tutor was having a key to the pool.) Leverett had in fact offered me a tutorship first, however, and its masters seemed very eager to have a resident Government tutor, so I And so it began... remained undecided while I considered both offers. In the end, I made my decision after thinking about what St. Patrick’s Day tea had been like at Adams House. Master Kiely had invited me to that tea so that I could get to know Adams House while I was applying. In the elegant confines of Apthorp House, Irish coffee, Jameson Irish Whiskey, and Guinness had all flowed freely. Irish step dancers and musicians provided entertainment. To top it off, Seamus Heaney, the greatest living poet in the English language (and sometime Adams House resident) read his poetry. Leverett House simply couldn’t compete. I chose Adams. G-Entry and Doug Fitch: 1984–85 In the fall of 1984, I moved into G-33. It was a relatively small room, but its bedroom and living room featured darkened oak trim, a fireplace, hardwood floors, and a view of the Lampoon. (I could watch their goings-on through the window; their parties could keep me up all night.) G- entry was not a very large entry, but for some reason it had two resident tutors. Doug Fitch ‘81, the other tutor in G-entry, had lived in Adams as an undergraduate and introduced me to many of the best traditions of the house. Doug first enlisted me to pose as if I were converted by Web2PDFConvert.com part of various pieces of furniture while he took photographs. He explained that he had a client who wanted furniture that looked like human bodies. Doug’s photographs would be the basis of visualizing what assorted pieces of this furniture would look like. Along with several other people, I lay on the floor in the squash courts and held my arms and legs up as if I were supporting a tabletop and otherwise contorted myself into different positions. It was very much like a game of Twister. I don’t know if Doug The incredible Doug Fitch ever created any furniture for his client, but his website (www.dougfitch.com) includes plenty of images of similarly outlandish furnishings and interior designs. Doug also introduced me to the Bow & Arrow Press in the basement of B-entry. We spent most of one night making a linocut of a brain and using it to print posters to promote a concert by a student rock band called the “The Whacked” (or was it “The Wacked”?). I never printed anything else in the Press, but I was proud to see one of those posters hanging on the walls many years later. On November 5, 1984, Doug knocked on my door in the middle of the afternoon, chanting, “What a day, what a day, for an auto-da-fé.” I was mildly alarmed by this prospect, but before I could inform Doug that I had other plans, he explained that we were going to burn Ronald Reagan in effigy to celebrate Guy Fawkes Day—a British holiday that features fireworks and the burning of Guy Fawkes in effigy on November 5 to commemorate the failure of Fawkes to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605. It was an offer I couldn’t refuse. Doug and several co- conspirators had already stuffed a dummy and put a Reagan mask on it. As we generated something akin to music on our kazoos, we marched the effigy to the banks of the Charles, ignited it, and threw it into the water without being apprehended by Harvard’s Republicans, the Cambridge Police, the Fire Department, or the Environmental Protection Agency. What I Did as a Resident Tutor I had multiple functions as a resident tutor. Like all resident tutors, I had some responsibilities for the entry where I lived. In addition to hosting entry parties and study breaks, I was supposed to ask students to keep their parties quiet. In my eight years in Adams House, however, I rarely had to do so. As time went on, Harvard and Adams House devised new rules and paperwork for monitoring parties, but my first few years in the house were blissfully free from such burdens. As the Government tutor, I taught the department’s sophomore tutorial to Government concentrators, signed study cards, offered general advice, and unofficially advised seniors who felt neglected by their official (faculty) thesis advisors. Despite its reputation as a haven for literati and Visual and Environmental Studies concentrators, Adams had a surprisingly large number of Government concentrators. I also attempted to run a Politics and Society table with Jeff Herf, a resident Social Studies tutor. Unfortunately, this project was never entirely successful. Jeff and I would invite senior faculty and visitors to Harvard to dinner, only to find that no more than a handful of students had time to join us. Most undergraduates were too busy to set aside an hour or more for these dinners. My main house-wide duty was to be the housing tutor. Although most houses assigned responsibility for housing to the assistant to the masters, the task was much more complex in Adams and had been delegated to an assistant senior tutor. Many Adamsians tended to have strong and idiosyncratic personalities, which meant that there were lots of roommate conflicts and requests to switch rooms. Adamsians also were likely to study abroad or to take time off, so every January there were many vacant spaces to fill and returning students to assign. converted by Web2PDFConvert.com I spent many evenings listening to students tell tales of woe about the outrageous behavior of their roommates and the ample reasons why one or all of them absolutely required a single room—or at least a new roommate. Even if there was a lot of self-serving exaggeration, I was exposed to what would later be called “Way Too Much Information” about the personal habits that made roommates incompatible. All those students can rest assured that I kept no records and time has erased my memories of most of the embarrassing details of those conversations. After hearing all the complaints, I usually found a way to reshuffle roommates in a series of chain-reaction moves that relocated those who wanted to move through a combination of roommate swaps and placing the discontented in vacancies created by students who departed at the end of the first semester. Students who remained dissatisfied glared at me in the hallways and dining hall. I also ran the annual housing lottery, which was always a spectacle, with a game-show atmosphere and screams of ecstasy (I remember an emphatic “Praise Vishnu!” from a happy student) and groans of despair. The lottery was far more stressful for the students who were picking rooms than it was for me, but I had to spend a lot of time running the lottery and devising rules that would allocate rooms fairly. (As housing tutor, I never forgot the advice my predecessor, Aaron Alter ‘79 gave me: “Whatever you do should be fair, but it’s even more important that it appear to be fair.”) Every year there were a few changes in the rules and room configurations.